WaterOperator.org Blog

2017 was a great year for the WaterOperator.org newsletter team. We not only reached our 200th edition milestone this past fall, but we also were successful in connecting a significant number of water professionals with useful and relevant resources, resources that could be used on-the-spot to solve pressing issues, or help guide utility best practices, or help water decision-makers plan ahead for their communities.

While many of the events, articles and resources featured in our newsletters garnered interest, here is a list of our most clicked-on resources of 2017.

Did you use one these resources at your utility this year? If so, we'd love to hear from you! Do you have a favorite "go-to" resource to share? Again, we'd love to know! Our email is info@wateropertor.org , or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter.

For a number of years, we struggled with an identity crisis. SmallWaterSupply.org was difficult to remember.

I’ve been to countless meetings where I show the site to someone and five minutes later they cannot remember the URL. It just doesn’t roll off your tongue. And in the online world, you want things to be as easy to remember as possible.

It happened so many times, it became sort of a running joke.

The final straw for me was sitting in a room of 200 people and listening to at least three people in a row butcher the name of our website. It was not their fault though. It was our fault and we're ready to make it right.

We are proud to announce that SmallWaterSupply.org has become WaterOperator.org. We believe this change will address many of the issues we faced in gaining traction as an invaluable web portal, though there is of course still work to do!

Why WaterOperator.org? When we first began to consider this change, I had been working with WEF on some projects and learned how they were planning to go away from the word “wastewater operator”. Their logic was that both drinking water and wastewater operators are treating water, just some are doing so before the tap and some are doing it after. I totally agreed. And let's face it, for many small systems, they are on both.

We were shocked that WaterOperator.org was an available URL, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What you'll find is that most of our features remain, but are just wrapped in a pretty new package. Our flagship tools, the event calendar and document database, made the journey successfully and are now mobile-responsive along with the rest of the site.

It's not perfect yet, but we're getting there. We're developing new help videos to offer visitors a tour as well as upgrading our resource databases on operator training programs and tribal partner contacts.

There are a lot of people here at the Illinois Water Survey and Illinois Water Resources Center that deserve the credit for this transition. My one contribution was insisting that the Paw Paw, Michigan water tower remain on the home page. (I'm sort of old school in that regard.)

I hope you like the changes we've made thus far. We're open to hearing any feedback you may have as we continue to improve new WaterOperator.org and make it your home on the web.